Getting Devices to Play Nice With Your Mac

Apple Devices "just work" with each other, but what if you have to use a non Apple device or phone for whatever reason? No problem. Here's how to get everything to play nice with your Mac.

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One of Apple's advertizing mottoes is that everything "just works." It's true. Apple products work exceptionally well with each other in an intuitive, easy to use fashion. Their new iCloud service is almost effortless to use, though you can only use it on up-to-date iDevices. The problems start when, for whatever reason, one has to use non-Apple products. Maybe your work requires you to use a Blackberry, or your phone carrier doesn't carry iDevices. Everything doesn't always "just work" with Macs on a network out of the box, a little (but not too much) elbow grease is involved. To someone only used to Macs and not used to fiddling like many PC users, this can seem like a bigger problem than it really is. Like most things, it's easy once you know how. Even if you don't have a smartphone or other mobile device, syncing your bookmarks and other data between more than one computer, or even between browsers on the same computer is a good idea. You can waste a lot of time finding that bookmark or file if they're not synched!

This is a much more in-depth guide for your iPhone synching needs. There isn't much, if anything, you can't find here including information on how to sync things on jailbroken phones, and non-iCloud options.

You can sync your Droid phone with your Mac using iTunes, although not everything will transfer. It's quite possible to achieve most of your synching needs with this method, plus you don't need to get any new software.

Android phones are pretty popular these says, but they're not exactly built with Macs in mind. Getting them to play nice with your Mac shouldn't be that hard with this guide. This is for if you don't want to use iTunes with for synching your Android phone.

It's not as hard as getting a Windows computer to get along in a cluster of Macs, but it's a little work getting Windows Phone 7 phones to play nice. Follow the guide here, and you should have no problems synching anything you want to your phone.

Dropbox is a neat service that allows you to sync data between any number of computers and/or devices also running Dropbox. This service, which comes with two gigabytes of free cloud storage space, is easy to set up and use. If two gigabytes isn't enough for your needs, there are much higher limits available for a monthly or yearly fee.

1password is a neat program that lets you use one master password for many of your password needs. It only works on one computer due to it encrypting all the other passwords it uses. By storing the master password file in your Dropbox folder, it will update across all computers and devices connected to your Dropbox account, allowing you to use 1password's encryption to keep your passwords secure wherever you compute. It's a little tricky to initially set up using this method, but is a great technique to keep your passwords accessible and safe.

One of the biggest hurdles to trying, let alone regularly using, multiple browsers is the lack of bookmark integration. While iCloud will update all your instances of Safari, Xmarks will allow you to sync instances of Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer on one machine. In practice, this will let you sync non-Safari bookmarks with iCloud.

You know what's even more annoying than not having your bookmarks synchronized one machine? Not having them synched on multiple machines. Check out this list to find our how to have one set of bookmarks wherever you go.